


Arp 87

by backlit (cuimhl)



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, M/M, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-30
Updated: 2017-11-30
Packaged: 2019-02-08 18:23:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,826
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12870381
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cuimhl/pseuds/backlit
Summary: tetsurou looks at tooru like the gentle give of earth under the press of his palm, warm cement toasting his heels in the height of summer. with a familiarity that makes tooru’s heart ache and his knees weak, with a profound fondness and patient curiousity, and tooru finds himself wondering if it would be crime to look at someone else the way he looks at hajime.( a study in seasons )





	Arp 87

 

**summer**

Tooru falls in love like he wakes up, bleary-eyed dry-mouthed resurfacing from the vaporous haze of his dreams, like the collision of two galaxies: gas and orbits winding together, stars evading stars by light years of distance, a quiet tangle of cosmic dust distinguishable only by a pinprick of light amidst the hushed hinterland of space.

He wakes up to, perhaps, the silhouette of Antennae Galaxies devouring each other in their waltz to become one, but in truth it’s more like Arp 87. He wakes up to summer tumbling through his uncurtained window, sunshine swallowing him bright and velvet-warm as he crumples the bedsheets in his fist and exhales slowly.

In Tooru’s thirteenth summer, he figures out that he wants to kiss boys, that he’s in love with Hajime, and that when Hajime touches him, there’s no soulmate bruise left behind. It’s an inverse of the ache that lingers: the absence of a wound that coruscates under his skin like a star going supernova, a sign for the beginning of the end. But Tooru has heard stories of people who never met their soulmates, people who are in difficult relationships and choose to commit in spite of some grander design which has, however temporarily, abandoned them to bleak incertitude.

Hajime hasn’t had any revelations yet, but Tooru can be patient. He’s good at waiting — for Hajime to leave the gym so that he can prolong serving practice late into the evening without being scolded; for his knee to burn until collapse before he puts on the ugly brace and makes Hajime worry; for Hajime to maybe, possibly, love him back one day. Because he _knows_ that they could work. Tooru is a little guilty for his selfishness, but Hajime has stuck with him for a decade — what harm is another eight, right?

Tooru is also good at lying, to others yet most of all to himself, but he hopes desperately that this time it will be different.

 

 

( he should have realised that was a lie, too. )

 

 

**autumn**

Fall ignites the longing that rests, dormant and undisturbed, heavy in Tooru’s bones. His heart pounds when he greets Hajime in the mornings. He struggles to sleep. His skin crawls with corrosive jealousy when he finds Valentine’s chocolate still unopened, but kept, in Hajime’s cupboard, and he wonders absently if Hajime likes the girl even though he knows he doesn’t.

Hajime’s touch sears his skin and Tooru checks obsessively to see whether it has left an imprint; his wrists turn to water at the thought of touching Hajime back, and he burns all over with a terrifying kind of hunger that can only be satiated by longer training sessions, more volleyball bruises blossoming like heather over his forearms.

He starts to doubt himself.

Autumn is short, but the leaves take months to fall. By the time winter bleeds through the morning frost, there are still skeletons of leaves hanging, forlorn, from the branches of the tree outside his window. But to _fall_ : the earth draws him in, and Tooru stumbles once, falls, and doesn’t get up. New stars rarely form in elliptical galaxies, and with the myriad directions in which older stars orbit his own galactic centre, Tooru always feels off-balance. Nervous, anxious, fingers outstretched until his hands ache, for something the universe just isn’t willing to put within reach.

In his second year of high school, Aoba Johsai lose to Shiratorizawa at the interhigh again. Tooru isn’t surprised, but he wishes he could be. Hajime begins to consider universities in Tokyo.

 

 

**winter**

When Tooru first realised that Betelgeuse was braced on the precipice of death, that Orion would lose his shooting hand, he curled up in his bed and cried.

He loses to Karasuno in his third year at the inter-high. Uninvited, he clambers into Hajime’s room next door at midnight and they sit together on his roof. The unclouded night sky, reassuring in its constancy, surrenders Orion outlined in stars, above the seawater streets swimming in feeble halos of stuttering streetlights and the reflection of the moon in Hajime’s unfathomable gaze.

Tooru takes a deep breath, says, “I like you.”

In the cold mouth of the night, Hajime’s hand finds Tooru’s and he squeezes, replies, “I’m sorry.”

Tooru smiles bitterly. “I know,” he sighs. _It’s okay._ His chest feels heavier than before, as though crushed under the distant gravitational pull of the Andromeda Galaxy. He has two stories to tell:

“Arp 87,” he explains, when he can trust his voice not to waver again, “consists of two galaxies that almost collided but didn’t.”

Hajime doesn’t respond, but Tooru knows he is listening. “Between them, there is this trail of dust and gas and stars, torn between two galactic centres that are travelling in different directions.”

But far off into the future, scientists think that the galaxies might reconvene, coalesce into one again. He doesn’t tell Hajime this, because he doesn’t deserve the weight of guilt; he doesn’t tell Hajime this, so that Tooru won’t remember to hope foolishly again.

And then, “Betelgeuse is a stupid, hard-working star. It keeps making these heavy elements in the core, which other stars can use after it dies. But nothing changes the fact that it is going to die, and Orion will lose a shoulder.”

In the darkness, Hajime squeezes his hand again. There, Tooru's knee pulses with overexertion. There, his palms sting from the impact of the ball. Today, they lost. Tooru holds his breath, shuts his eyes, and breathes out.

 

 

**spring**

Between the bustling, overcrowded quad and the secluded herbarium where Tooru likes to study, he slams bodily into a stranger and returns to his dormitory with a bruise the diameter of his palm, souring green-gold at the edges. It barely hurts, and tingles instead. Tooru hates it so much that he showers with his shirt on, and doesn’t tell Hajime; he’s not ready.

 

 

**summer**

Tooru’s head spins. Cheap beer sloshes in the pit of his stomach, his hand trembles under the frantic tessellation of fluorescent lights, and he’s trying to discreetly make his escape from the suffocating presence of an overbearing drunkard. The kick of obnoxious bassline melds with the dizzying rush of blood in his ears, the thud of his heart rattling in his ribs; a boy weaves through the crowd and cuts between tooru and the unwanted attention. Later, he tap-dances his fingertips over the crest of Tooru’s shoulder and kisses him gently, honey-sweet, against the wall of an empty hallway.

From the swathe of liquid dreams sluicing over the film of Tooru’s consciousness, he emerges starved for breath, a mouthful of _Tetsurou_ and a belt of indigo stars in the junction between his neck and shoulder. Each fingerprint is startling to look at, and for a moment there is a confusing twist of bittersweet emotion in his gut, before Tooru dispels it in the sickening hollowness of his disappointment.

This time, Hajime sees. Looks at him knowingly. Tells him, “Don’t be stupid, go and find out his name.”

 

 

**autumn**

For as long as he is able to, Tooru disregards the discovery and makes it a mission to avoid the half-unfamiliar, offensively attractive figure of Kuroo Tetsurou around campus. There is a feeling of anticipation that balloons inside him, poised to burst. Tooru has cushioned his heart in folds of obstinate avoidance, but he wonders — can the threshold be breached? The thick smoke that surrounds him, drowns him with the cut of Hajime’s jaw against his knuckles and his taciturn perspicacity that pierces Tooru to the marrow, could just as well be weightless space in the dusty cave of a bell jar, and Tooru will never know what it is that he fails to catch within that self-imposed vacuum of sound.

In the evening, Hajime sweeps into the room smelling like barbecue and floral perfume, mouth twitching with the vestiges of a smile Tooru has never seen him wear before. He looks so frustratingly beautiful, and he breaks Tooru’s heart.

“So you’ve found them,” Tooru intones, hating himself for the sting of betrayal that shadows his words. Hating the kind of monster that jealousy has transformed him into.

“Yes,” Hajime says softly, apologetically. He shows Tooru the faint bruise cradled in the well of his palm, features softened by vulnerable, burgeoning hope. “I have.”

 

 

**winter**

If only to protect the new glow, the decanted crystal-light of Hajime simmering through Tooru’s drag of days like Achernar, like Rigel, blinking back at him from a sky otherwise obscured by citysmoke and winter threads of fraying cloud — if only for Hajime, Tooru lets him go.

Tooru becomes a white dwarf. He lets the heartbreak sink through his skin and feels nothing, sits down with his coursework and flies through dissertation papers, earns a little alcove of university renown. The hypothesised crystal lattice of carbon and oxygen beneath the crust of a white dwarf’s surface cools to viscous pitch between his ribs, then cools to stone. Diamonds, famous for being little more than crystallised carbon, are a little like him — or perhaps, it’s the other way around. Or perhaps, they’re completely different. After all, diamonds always find themselves onto engagement rings, and Tooru might never fall in love again.

Nursing a glass of hot chocolate, Tooru curls up on the abandoned balcony of another Friday night party.

“A pretty stranger like you, not the centre of attention downstairs?”

Tetsurou’s hair is longer. His smile is quieter, his movements cautious. Tooru stares at the way that he takes his hand and presses tentative violets into Tooru’s palm with the pad of his thumb when he doesn’t pull away. Despite himself, Tooru tastes guilt when he leans in to kiss the corner of Tetsurou’s mouth, brushing his lips feather-light over the curve of his bemused smile.

“I’m sorry,” he whispers, watching Tetsurou’s mouth bloom faintly blue in the pearlescent moonlight.

“You’re in love with Iwaizumi,” Tetsurou replies. It’s not a question, and his gaze is soft when it lands on Tooru.

“I am,” Tooru agrees, not knowing how Tetsurou knows, but supposing he might’ve expected it. _And I might be forever._

 

 

**spring**

But Tetsurou doesn’t drift away; he stays, in shadows of bruises on Tooru’s pale skin when they bump shoulders as they walk, or in Tooru’s dormitory after his morning tutorial so that they can eat lunch together, in pieces that fit into hollows of Tooru’s life whose presence he had never noticed before. Tetsurou doesn’t ask for much —

 

 

( “the blessing of your friendship would be magical, princess.”

“be silent, knave.” )

 

 

And Tooru has heard of this before, too: soulmates who meet and don’t quite fall in love, whether because of a partner’s commitment to another relationship, or circumstantial mismatches, or a myriad of other mess-ups in the universe’s powerful web. But soulmates, whether romantically connected or not, are always emotionally compatible on some mysterious level, and the ambiguous bond between Tooru and Tetsurou is no exception.

Tetsurou is a breath of fresh air. Over time, His touches stop leaving imprints behind, and Tooru figures that their lives may now be considered, by consequence, inextricably intertwined. Hajime promised long ago to stay by Tooru’s side and he doesn’t break his promises; he doesn’t break this one, either. But he’s around a little _less_ , and that’s fine, because Tetsurou is around a little _more_ and — Tooru, honestly, doesn’t know how to feel about anything anymore.

He takes a walk with Tetsurou in the herbarium, gushing about stars and the symbolism of heather, and for a moment — just one — Tooru catches the way that Tetsurou looks at him.

 

 

( the gentle give of earth under the press of his palm. warm cement toasting his heels in the height of summer. like a neutron star to tooru’s wolf-rayet, or the way that hubble photographs seem to worship their subject material in the tepid blur of pixelation, having inherited a scientist’s devoted adoration for the vistas of space stretching beyond comprehension. with a familiarity that makes tooru’s heart ache and his knees weak, with a profound fondness and patient curiousity, and tooru finds himself wondering if it would be crime to look at someone else the way he looks at hajime. )

 

 

**summer**

Tooru falls in love like he wakes up, bleary-eyed dry-mouthed resurfacing from the vaporous haze of his dreams, like the collision of two galaxies: gas and orbits winding together, stars evading stars by light years of distance, a quiet tangle of cosmic dust distinguishable only by a pinprick of light amidst the hushed hinterland of space.

He wakes up to a major merger: two galaxies of similar sizes converging, like a love affair between the Milky Way and Andromeda, or as awkward and inexplicable as the spiral arms of Centaurus A, the fruit of two conjoined galaxies which carries the trademarks of both a spiral and elliptical galaxy. Perhaps, it is like this: although Arp 87 isn't quite the  _pas de deux_ of two major galaxies, the way they choreograph an intricate gravitational [dance](http://hubblesite.org/image/2193/gallery), slipping apart once but pulled back together, might be the best fit after all.

It’s summer, there are aliens in outer space, and Tooru might be kind of, slightly, slowly falling in love with Kuroo Tetsurou.

When he reaches across a cluster of violets to draw Tetsurou’s attention towards the sunny heads of early-blooming moonbeam coreopsis, his palm leaves a violent, blackened bruise on Tetsurou’s bicep, and they both stare at it in consternation.

Tetsurou is the first to recover. “Doesn’t that mean —”

Tooru blushes to his collar, whipping his head around to evade Tetsurou’s widening gaze and trying to unsee the way his mouth curled up into an insuppressible smile. When soulmate bruises go away, it signifies the settling of a relationship into equilibrium; when they return, it is more often than not a suggestion of newfound romantic attraction. Or something. Tooru makes to run away, but Tetsurou wraps his long fingers around Tooru’s wrist.

He asks, composure rippling into a hint of plaintive desperation, “Do you mean it?”

Inhaling, Tooru takes in the way summer is sweeping the headdresses of spring blossoms from trees that line the sidewalk. He thinks about Hajime first, then about colliding galaxies, and how warm Tetsurou’s embrace is. He could say anything, and Tetsurou would not demand anything more.

“Yes,” Tooru coughs. “I’m not sure — about anything, really — what this means, what we do, but you’re — you’re not asking about that, are you?”

He doesn’t wait for Tetsurou to answer and turns around, slipping his arm from Tetsurou’s grasp to lace their fingers together, one at a time. “If you’re asking about how I feel, then yes, I mean it. Will you go —”

Tetsurou kisses him gently, tilting his head up with the knuckle of his index finger, resting his palm against Tooru’s nape. Surprised by the tender gesture as well as the shiver of delight that thrums up his spine, Tooru huffs out a shivery laugh against Tetsurou’s lips. He feels braver.

“Will you go on a date with me?”

For a moment, Tetsurou doesn’t answer. He only appraises Tooru slowly with his amber eyes, tracing his brow down the slope of his nose, to the bow of his upper lip. Horror punches Tooru in the stomach and he hurries to backtrack: “Wait — I don’t — I don’t deserve to say that, I’m sorry for assuming, even after stringing you along —”

“Tooru,” Tetsurou sighs. “That’s not what i meant. You did take a long time to figure things out, but I didn’t expect,” he waves his hand in a vague motion, “any of this. It’s not your fault that you fell in love with Iwaizumi. I’m —” he bites his lip, brow furrowing. “I’m trying to take this in, that’s all.”

“Okay,” Tooru tightens his hold on Tetsurou’s hand, and feels him squeeze back in response. The shape of his palm is different to Hajime’s, and his fingers too: longer, yes, a bit crooked in the knuckle of his thumb. _Tetsurou_ and _Hajime_ are different but — Tooru is allowed to love more than once. He gets it. But it might take a bit longer until he can wholeheartedly believe it, and forgive himself too.

“So,” he clears his throat. “About that date, i was wondering: do you offer French kisses on the first date?”

Tetsurou’s smile turns predatory and calculating. His eyes darken, and Tooru returns the sultry glance that he tosses at him, under the dark fan of his lashes. “I’ll make an exception for you,” he drawls, voice low and thick as velvet. “Does the date start right now?”

“Well —” Tooru hesitates. But this is Tetsurou, whom he understands in ways he can’t quite articulate, and there’s no reason to be so afraid of venturing into the unknown with Tetsurou, even if they must travel light years to reach a comfortable space for the two of them.

“Yeah. Yes, it starts right now.” He leans in, and Tetsurou meets him halfway.

 

**Author's Note:**

> i'm in a state of demoralising writer's block at the moment, so this was...punched out, i guess. it's very self-indulgent and ambiguous prose, which i confess is comforting for me to write, but i'm really sorry if things are super unclear !! still, i enjoyed writing this, so i hope it brought you the tiniest bit of enjoyment in reading, too. feedback would be very welcome (feel free to kindly point out inconsistencies) ʘ‿ʘ 
> 
> a/n:  
> \- the [antennae galaxies](https://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_1086.html), [arp 87](http://hubblesite.org/image/2193/gallery), and [centaurus a](https://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_2143.html) are all cool galaxies (just for emphasis)  
> \- the white dwarf reference is a...pseudo-scientific twist in an attempt to explain tooru's internal numbness through the obscure analogy of white dwarf stars, which are said to be composed of carbon & oxygen under the crust — a bit like non-solid diamonds  
> \- neutron stars and wolf-rayet stars are sometimes in binary systems (2 stars which are gravitationally bound)  
> \- moonbeam coreopsis [blossoms](http://www.perennials.com/plants/coreopsis-verticillata-moonbeam.html) are very pretty!


End file.
